The shelter: Faces inside the cages

Published: Sunday, October 27, 2013 at 05:27 PM.

Along with advice to adopting families, the shelter works with a number of local and regional rescue groups to move animals and at least find them a foster home until permanent adopters are found.

Smith and her fellow workers constantly update their adoption board and show their pets on numerous websites, radio stations and pet shops as well as showing them through the Sun Journal.

Every eight weeks Smith also selects four dogs to be sent to the “New Leash on Life” training program at the Craven Correctional Institution near Vanceboro. There, inmates “teach them basic obedience” in an 8-week program, after which Pals for Paws adopts them out.

Smith recently attended the 50th graduation for the program.

“It’s great for the dogs. It’s great for the inmates, too,” she said, and related one prisoner who told her that he’d never had responsibility in his life until he was given the opportunity to train a dog.

He stared at me from behind the counter with huge, expressive eyes that suggested he’d been dealt some pretty bad cards of late. I walked behind the counter and took a seat (privilege of familiarity at the animal shelter; don’t try this yourself) and asked the Weimaraner’s name.

“Hank,” I was told. I focused my camera on him and I could tell he wasn’t trusting of whatever it was I was up to.

Hank did not belong in a place like this, but at 3 years old, he was just getting out of his canine “teenage” and had never been neutered, so he was pretty lively. High energy is a defining trait of this breed, anyway.

“I just can’t take it anymore,” his owners said as they left him at the Craven-Pamlico Animal Services Center on Airport Road, according to animal control supervisor Trinity Smith. “She had just given up.”

Hank’s first days at the shelter were rough. Being locked in the general run with numerous other dogs, all barking and howling, made him a nervous wreck.

“He was scared,” Smith said. He wouldn’t let people near him.

The shelter workers decided to try him in other environs about the shelter. Placed in the grooming room, he destroyed a doorknob, chewing it and trying to get out.

He was brought out to the front desk, then, and soon calmed down. The day after my visit, the Tarheel Weimaraner Rescue picked him up. He was wormed, neutered and placed in a foster home for assessment.

“Weimaraners are very, very active, people-oriented dogs,” Toni Sweetland, intake officer with the rescue said in a phone interview. “They want to be with their person all the time. They are not the kind of dog you can get and keep in the back yard.”

***

Then there was Buttercup.

A 3-year-old Domestic Shorthair (a dignified way of saying, “this cat is a mutt”), Buttercup was left at the shelter when her owner decided she couldn’t take care of her anymore.

She was scheduled to be one of the Pets of the Week, a regular Saturday photo-feature in the Sun Journal.

She was a lover of a cat, but the shock of her change in fortunes terrified her; we actually had to dismantle her cage to pull her out, removing the litter pan, the shelving and even the bottom of the cage. My sister, visiting from Florida, volunteered to hold and calm her, and Buttercup clung to her desperately and trembled the entire time she was on her lap.

Cats have a more difficult time adapting to being in a shelter. “We don’t get a lot of friendly cats, even owner turn-ins,” she said. “They come in here and stress out. They’re hiding in their litter box and spraying and things that are not adoptable. Cats are temperamental about change.”

If a cat does not adapt, it can find itself in the euthanization room.

***

A lot of pets find themselves in shelters because their owners simply were not ready or willing for the responsibilities of ownership.

Animals come in “for minor, minor things,” Smith said. “I had a man that brought his dog in here because he left his sandwich on the coffee table and the dog ate it. Another took a dog home for an hour and, because the dog scratched at the back door to get in, he brought it back.”

Some pets, of course, are turned in for what Smith describes as good reasons.

“You’ve got your aggressive dogs and that kind of thing,” she noted. And then there are those people who can no longer keep pets and have been unable to find anyone who can take them on, such as when the owner is going to a nursing home, when people move out of the area or when landlords will not allow animals.

“We get a lot of animals from the military,” she said.

Then there are those Craig’s List and Cherry Point Yard Sales orphans. People pick them up and take them home. “After a month or so, they decide, ‘I can’t do this,’” she explained.

Nine-month-old to 2-year-old dogs arrive “because that’s when they’re a teenager. He’s testing his boundaries, and they can be really hard to live with. So a lot of puppies we adopt will come back at that age because he’s not as cute and he’s behaving badly.”

***

While any variety of animals shows up at the shelter, there are certain kinds that predominate.

“We get mostly mixed breeds. We get a lot of hound mix, we get a lot of pit bull mix. Mostly they’re going to be your 50-pound dogs or mixed breed puppies that are going to grow into 50-pound-dogs.”

As to cats, it is mainly “your basic short-hair cat” that arrives. While the shelter sees its shares of Siamese mixes and others, it is rare to find a pedigree brought in.

But feral cats are the biggest feline issue.

“The majority of animals we get are cats,” Smith said, “and the majority of cats are feral. We get tons of feral cats in here.”

And if there’s any animal almost guaranteed to be euthanized, it’s feral cats, because feral cats are, quite frankly, wild.

“If you get them young enough you can get them rehabilitated,” she said, “and by young enough I mean 8 weeks old. … There’s a very small window where kittens have to be socialized with people.”

Even if wild cats can be tamed enough to tolerate people, they don’t often become loving. And people don’t want that, Smith said. “They want a loving, purring-in-your-lap cat.”

A few feral cats make it out alive. “We’ll get cats in here you would think were completely feral but after a couple of days of being in here, being around people, they get friendly.”

She added: “A person might come in and claim a feral cat saying they’ve been feeding it and are willing to live with its personality.”

Animals also are brought in as a result of cases of abuse or cruelty. Sometimes a person who is charged with cruelty voluntarily releases the pet to the shelter. If an owner won’t surrender rights, the animal control officers can petition a court to force the owner to pay for the animal’s care while the case moves through the courts. “If they don’t pay it, it’s an automatic forfeiture of the animals,” Smith said.

“We’ve had lots of dogs come in here with signs of fighting,” she said, “but to prove that’s what’s going on — that’s difficult.”

***

Among the dogs, the small ones almost always go, as do puppies and kittens. Purebreds of any size have a good chance of finding a home.

“But if it’s a large mixed-breed dog, it can be very difficult,” Smith said. “Especially if there’s nothing flashy about it; if it’s all black, all brown, they tend to be overlooked.”

Along with advice to adopting families, the shelter works with a number of local and regional rescue groups to move animals and at least find them a foster home until permanent adopters are found.

Smith and her fellow workers constantly update their adoption board and show their pets on numerous websites, radio stations and pet shops as well as showing them through the Sun Journal.

Every eight weeks Smith also selects four dogs to be sent to the “New Leash on Life” training program at the Craven Correctional Institution near Vanceboro. There, inmates “teach them basic obedience” in an 8-week program, after which Pals for Paws adopts them out.

Smith recently attended the 50th graduation for the program.

“It’s great for the dogs. It’s great for the inmates, too,” she said, and related one prisoner who told her that he’d never had responsibility in his life until he was given the opportunity to train a dog.

“They learn responsibility, they learn how to empathize,” she said of the animals’ caretakers. “It’s really kind of cool to see that.”

***

Inevitably, some animals are euthanized. “It’s not something we like to do, of course,” Smith said, “but it’s a reality.”

Along with feral cats, any badly injured or very sick animal will probably be put down. “(A pet owner will) come in and say, ‘This dog killed my neighbor’s cat.’ Or bitten somebody. I’m not going to put that up for adoption,” Smith said.

“We ask ourselves, have we done everything we could? A lot of times, you have to ask, ‘What would be more humane?’ A lot of times, the animals that are in here, they’re terrified. They’re miserable. And that’s releasing them from that terror.”

The shelter also euthanizes pets at no charge, as a service to the community.

The shelter euthanizes with what Smith describes as an overdose of anesthetic. All the shelter employees are state-certified to euthanize animals.

She said that the animal will “feel the initial prick of the syringe,” but nothing more. “If it’s done properly, the heart will stop in seconds. It’s that fast.”

“This is reality,” she says. “We all cry. We’ve all had animals here that we’ve thrown our bodies on and beat the bushes for a rescue group to take them or get them adopted.”

She thinks a moment before she adds, “I do say it’s not for everybody. I try to correct them. When they say, ‘I couldn’t do what you do’…I couldn’t not do it. I can’t imagine myself doing anything else.